Thursday, 13 April 2017

Leverets & Plovers: the origin of the Easter Bunny?

My favourite theory about the origin of the Easter Bunny is
this one, which I found in a wonderful book called The Leaping Hare, by George
Ewart Evans and David Thomson.

‘Some images have
their origin in the observation of nature, and that may be true of the Easter
hare. Birds, like the plover, that make nests on the ground lay their eggs near
the hares’ forms. They may even choose a deserted form and convert it. Their eggs
and baby leverets are frequently found on the same terrain in spring.’
(p134)

I love this idea of spotting hares nosing about in old forms
(the sort of dent, or seat, a hare makes in a field, to lay low in) where there
might now be plover, or lapwing, eggs.

In a separate section of the book, we’re given a wonderful
transcript of conversations with a warrener and gamekeeper named Percy Muitt.
He was born in Blythburgh, Suffolk in 1909 and worked nearby. (Incidentally, Blythburgh
church now has a special animal blessing service at Easter, where pets are
brought along. When I attended, one girl brought a spider in a match box to be
blessed.)

Percy Muitt gives many vivid accounts of hares, and here’s
the part that supports the ‘observation of nature theory’:

‘Well, I go about: I’ve
done nothing else all my life only wandered about here, and I fell in with
these little leverets; and I’ve seen ‘em as I’ve looked for plovers’ eggs. I’ve
seen two little leverets on an owd stubble, on an owd corn-stubble. They make
little seats just like their mothers do, just backed in, you know. Before I
left that field there was a tremendous storm; and I was back on to this field
after this heavy storm because I thought they must be dead; and there they set –
just the same; and everywhere was all over water. I saw these little owd chaps
there and I said to myself: “Well, they can’t survive.” (but we used to look at
the field every four days, so we used to look at ‘em twice at that time o’day,
look at ‘em twice to pick these owd plovers’ eggs up, years ago.) They’d moved
two hundred yards away, and they’d grown. They were four or five days old, nice
little chaps; they were alive and well’. (p55)

An old-fashioned egg hunt with baby hares all about, and nice little chaps too. It’s
certainly an image that’s hard to resist. I wonder what Percy Muitt would have
made of chocolate eggs wrapped in foil and cartoon bunnies everywhere…

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About Me

I am a writer, mainly of short stories, and those often with a folkloric bent. Some of these I write as part of my PhD in Creative Writing, at the University of Chichester. I am associate editor at The Word Factory, where I co-run a short story club, and I also run my own critique group for short story writers in London. Before all of that, I studied Philosophy for a long time, with an emphasis on philosophy of mind and rationality. I live in London and have a 'real' job as well as writing, but happily I reside by a little patch of woods which is all I need to keep me sane.